Forgotten soldiers. We all know about Gallipoli; hopelessly conceived mess, dreamed up by Churchill to move the Great War from France to an invasion of Germany's Ottoman allies in 1915.

Embark a vast army of Australians, New Zealanders, British, French and others east of Istanbul in order to smash "Johnny Turk". Problem: the Turks fought back ferociously as Mustafa Kemal (later Ataturk, titan of the 20th century, etc) used his Turkish 19th Army Division to confront the invaders' first wave. Problem two: most of the division were not Turks at all.

They were Arabs. Two-thirds of the first men to repel the Anzacs were Syrian Arabs from what is today Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and "Palestine". Of the 87,000 "Turkish" troops who died defending the Dardanelles, many were Arabs.

As Palestinian Professor Salim Tamari now points out, the same applies to the Ottoman battles of Suez, Gaza and Kut al-Amara. In the hitherto unknown diary of Private Ihsan Turjman of the Ottoman Fourth Army - he would today be called a Palestinian Arab - there was nothing but scorn for those Arab delegations from Palestine and Syria who sent delegations "to salute the memory of our martyrs in this war and to visit the wounded".

What, he asked in his secretly kept diary, were these Arabs playing at? "Do they mean to strengthen the relationship between the Arab and Turkish nations... truth be told, the Palestinian and Syrian people are a cowardly and submissive lot." This is stunning stuff.

Far more Arabs fought against the Allies for the Ottomans than ever joined Lawrence's Arab revolt, but here is Private Turjman expressing fury at his masters.

Year Of The Locust is short but darkly fascinating, concentrating on the Great War diaries of three Ottoman soldiers, one an actual Turk, the others Palestinian Arabs. Scarcely ever do we read of the personal lives of our Ottoman opponents.

In 1917, when Turjman was shot dead by an Ottoman officer, Palestinian Arabs were less concerned about the Balfour Declaration than whether the British would give them independence, annex them to Egypt or allow them a Syrian homeland. How wrong could they have been? Britain had no intention of adding to its Egyptian interests when it had already given its support to a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

The lives of the other two diarists, one Turkish, the other Arab, would revolve around Palestinians who came to believe that Jewish immigration would threaten their future. But it is the Great War that dominates their memoirs.

It is important to remember these Ottomans, Turkish or Arab. Turjman's diary records the plague of locusts that settled upon Jerusalem, the cholera, typhus and the 50 Jerusalem prostitutes sent to entertain Turkish officers, the Ottomans hanged outside the Jaffa Gate for desertion, the Turkish aircraft that crashes .

Long forgotten now are the Arab-Turkish Ottoman inmates of the Tsarist prison camp at Krasnoyarsk, in Russia, where Lieutenant Aref Shehadeh, born in Jerusalem in 1892, ended up.

But the most impressive text in this tiny book is not a diary but a letter from Shehadeh's wife, Saema, in Jerusalem when, 30 years later, he had set off for Gaza as a British mandate officer.

She writes: "It is your presence that makes this garden beautiful.

"Nothing has a taste without you. May God not deprive me of your presence, for it is you who makes my (our) life beautiful. When you left us last time I noticed that you had a little cold. I am thinking about it.

"Let me know about your health. Your life's partner, who loves you with all her heart. Saema."